Also 7 tillar, 9 tillow. [f. TILLER sb.3] intr. Of corn or other plants: To produce ‘tillers’ or side shoots from the root or base of the stem; also said of the shoots thus arising. Also with out, forth.
1677. Plot, Oxfordsh., 245. The Seed in the rich [Land] does tillar, i. e. sprout into several blades and spread on the ground.
1733. Tull, Horse-Hoeing Husb., xix. 270. More Stalks would have Tillered out.
1743. Maxwell, Sel. Trans. Soc. Improv. Agric. Scot., 24. Clover-plants, when they have room to grow, tiller or stool, and employ more Ground than those of Corn.
1805. R. W. Dickson, Pract. Agric., I. 463. Oats do not tiller so much as other grains.
1813. Vancouver, Surv. Hampshire, 196. The more that the crown of this plant is … divided, the greater disposition it has to stool and tillow forth in additional stems and succours.
1868. Rep. U.S. Commissioner Agric. (1869), 406. It [wheat] tillered astonishingly, as many as fifty heads growing from one kernel.
b. trans. To throw out (stalks, etc.) by tillering.
1787. Winter, Syst. Husb., 207. The roots of the drilled [wheat] tillered out from ten or twelve to upwards of thirty stalks on each root.
Hence Tillered ppl. a., having several shoots or stems springing from one root; Tillering vbl. sb. and ppl. a.
1733. Tull, Horse-hoeing Husb., vii. 72. These Tillered Ho’d Stalks, if they were planted sparsim all over the Interval, it might seem well cover’d.
1764. Museum Rust., III. XII. 46. There is a particular season for its tillering, or spreading; another for its upright growth.
1833. Ridgemont Farm Rep., 137, in Libr. Usef. Knowl., Husb., III. By a rapid and early vegetation of the wheat, the tillering branches of the young plant are apt to exhaust themselves.
1885. W. K. Parker, Mammalian Descent, vi. 158. The multiplied (or tillered) stems of a wheat-plant.
† Tiller, v.2: see TILLERING vbl. sb.1
